Silences
Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin
Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
First Feminist Press edition, 2003
Copyright © 1965, 1972, 1978 by Tillie Olsen
“Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons
Silences
Has Taught Us” by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., from
Listening
to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism,
edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. “Tillie Olsen’s Reading Lists” copyright © 1972, 1973, and 1974 by the Feminist Press, reprinted from
Women’s Studies Newsletter.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Tthe Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First edition, 1978, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York. Portions of this work were first published in substantially
different form as: “Silences” in
Harper’s Magazine
(1965) and
Ms.
Magazine (1978); “Women Who Are Writers in Our Century” in
College English
(1972); and the Afterword to
Life in the Iron Mills
by Rebecca Harding Davis, The Feminist Press, 1972.
For information on material quoted in this volume, see page 303, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Olsen, Tillie.
Silences / Tillie Olsen; introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin — 1st Feminist Press ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-879-4
1. Literature—Women authors—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Authorship—Sex differences. 3. women and literature. I. Title.
PN 151.04 2003
809'.89287—dc21
The Feminist Press would like to thank
the Renée B. Fisher Foundation for its generous support of this project. The Press also gratefully acknowledges the support of Elaine Reuben, Florence Howe, Nancy M. Porter, Panthea Reid, Janet Zandy, Lynda Koolish, and Martha Boesing.
Text design of title copyright © 1978 by Walter Harper
Printed on acid-free paper by Transcontinental Printing
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Acknowledgments
To every writer quoted or named herein: for much of the content, as well as comprehension, in this book.
For means and time: the Radcliffe Institute (where “Silences” came into being); the MacDowell Colony (where I worked on Rebecca Harding Davis); the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, who made possible the first work on this book.
For help when asked: Ann Lipow, Pat Ray, for
books. Marilynn Meeker and Rachel Klein for literate copy-editing. Hannah Green and Mary Anne Ferguson for reading the entire ms., and Laurie Olsen, who kept with it from its beginning. Florence Howe, who (1971) did all she could to make
Life in the Iron Mills
and my afterword a book actuality. Julie Jordan, Martha Parry, Sue Gardinier, Kathie Olsen, Julie Edwards, Karla Lutz, Jack Olsen, Sally
Wick Begardy, Pat Koontz, Addy and Merle Brodsky. For help when asked. And for other reasons.
For inviting me to speak in 1971, and thus bringing “One Out of Twelve” into being: the Women’s Commission of the Modern Lan-guage Association.
For remaining, reminding: My mother and my father, Sara Vore Taylor, Genya Gorelick, Jack Eggan, Patricia Thompson, Constance Smith, Michelle Murray (whose
as yet unpublished journals must not be lost into silence), Theodora Ward, Amy Schechter, Harold Rice, Avrum Olshansky. All earth and air for years, now. “Shine on me still.”
To the unnamed here, whose work and beings are also sustenance; among them those whose life coursings have schooled me ineradicably in the shaping power and inequality of circumstance; beginning when I was a child at Kellom
and Long Schools in Omaha and crossed the tracks to Central High School (my first College-of-Contrast).
[This] is sent out to those into whose souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some time of their lives.
—Thomas Hardy, of his
Jude the Obscure
For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.
For those of us (few yet in number, for the way is punishing), their kin and descendants who begin to emerge into more
flowered and rewarded use of our selves in ways denied to them;—and by our achievement bearing witness to what was (and still is) being lost, silenced.
Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.
These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural;
the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.
This book is about such silences. It is concerned with the relationship of circumstances—including class, color, sex; the times, climate
into which one is born—to the creation of literature.
It consists of two talks given nearly a decade apart—“Silences” (1962), “Women Who Are Writers in Our Century” (1971); an essay-afterword, “Rebecca Harding Davis,” written in 1971 to accompany reprint of work by a forgotten nineteenth-century woman writer; and a long aftersection: “Silences—II,” “The Writer-Woman—II,” for essential deepenings
and expansions.
This book is not an orthodoxly written work of academic scholarship. Do not approach it as such. Nor did it come into being through choosing a subject, then researching for it. The substance herein was long in accumulation, garnered over fifty years, near a lifetime; the thought came slow, hard-won; the talks and essay, the book itself, elicited.
A passion and a purpose inform
its pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers.
It is written to re-dedicate and encourage
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
—André Gide
CONTENTS
Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons
Silences
Has Taught Us by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century—1971
Rebecca Harding Davis—1971, 1972
PART TWO—Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources, Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions
Silences of the Great in Achievement
The Work of Creation and the Circumstances It Demands for Full Functioning
Subterranean Forces—And the Work of Creation in Circumstances Enabling Full Function
When the Claims of Creation Cannot Be Primary